Graham McGregor: Taking action in your marketing

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Many years ago I wrote a booklet called 'The 7 biggest mistakes that salespeople make and how to stop them losing you sales every week.'

(I was well qualified to write this booklet because I had personally made all 7 of these sales mistakes many, many times.)

My booklet was very basic. It was printed in black and white and had a photocopied cardboard cover that I folded over and stapled together myself.

I gave this short guide to 50 sales managers as a free gift. (Some were clients and others were people I had met but had not yet bought from me.)

12 months later I had a phone call from the training manager of one of the major banks here in New Zealand.

The training manager told me she had read my 7 sales mistakes booklet and liked my ideas. She explained she was looking for sales training material for the bank and wondered if she could meet with me to see what I had.

A week later I showed the training manager and her colleague the various sales training programmes that I had for sale. She looked at all of them and said 'We would like to take all of these programme, do you take Visa?'

I was happy to oblige and within a few minutes we had concluded a large sale.

I then asked the training manager 'how did you get my 7 mistakes booklet?' as I knew I had never given it to them. (And the bank had never been a client.)

She told me that they had found my 7 mistakes booklet in the desk drawer of a bank employee who had since left the bank.

And they had no idea how it got there in the first place.

Now when I think back to this booklet I am actually embarrassed at how poorly presented it was.

However I used it because in my mind it was 'good enough' to start doing something with.

The reason I mention this booklet is that many people think their marketing has to be 'perfect' in every way before they use it.

So I have met business people who have spent many months producing something like the 'perfect' promotional brochure for instance. It has to have the perfect look and image and words etc. And only then will they consider using it.

I think this is a big mistake because in marketing I've learned that some of the things you try will work and many will not.

So I would rather try 10 different marketing strategies in a month that are 'good enough'.

And then discover which ones work well and which ones don't.

(Instead of spending a month making one marketing strategy 'perfect' and then finding out it only gets average or even poor results when I actually get to use it.)

And that's my recommendation in this week's column.

Don't worry about your marketing being 'perfect' before you use it.

Just get into action this week and try something.

I guarantee if you take enough action and try a few different marketing strategies you'll get some good results. And many times 'good enough' is all you need to get started.

If you are looking for marketing strategies to do then email me using either of the email links at the start and end of this column.

Put 'The Marketing Magic Toolkit' in your subject line and tell me the type of business you have.

I'll email you a guide that has 101 different marketing strategies that you can use to improve sales, boost profits and create raving fans for your business.

(It's my free gift to you and all you have to is invest a moment of time and ask me for it. Just make sure you take action before October 31, 2015 to get this free guide.)

Have a great week of taking action.

'The shortest answer is doing.' Lord Herbert

Action Exercise:

Get into action this week and actually use any of the marketing strategies that I've been recommending in any of my previous Herald columns.

Graham McGregor is a consultant specialising in memorable marketing. Download his 396-page Unfair Business Advantage ebook at no charge from theunfairbusinessadvantage.com.